Cop Jamming

“The police couldn’t put you into their polarization
structure. They know how to deal with real criminals, but somebody who
puts eggplants on sticks — you’re making a mockery of their
social order, and that’s worse than what most criminals are capable
of doing.”

— Andrea Juno

The rigidity and humorlessness of cop culture is at once the
sniggler’s worst enemy and best friend.

When Canadian potheads learned that drug-sniffing dogs would be prowling
about on Vancouver ferries, they took action. They created an alcohol
solution of the essence of marijuana,
and during events they called
“spray days”
sprayed the solution all over the ferry boats to confuse the dogs.

In Elm Grove, Wisconsin, teenagers who felt unfairly targeted by cops on the
prowl for underage drinkers set up a sting of their own. They had a party
at which they gathered to drink root beer. When the cops came and
raided the party, the teenagers sued — saying that the police had
violated their rights when they stormed the property without either a
warrant or reasonable suspicion that a crime was being committed.
A federal judge agreed!

George Washington University students suspected that the police were
monitoring their social networking websites to determine where and when
their parties would be held, so that they could raid them on the pretext
of enforcing laws against under-age drinking. They then announced a
beer-“themed” party but were careful to have no actual alcohol
on-site —
“The look on the faces of the cops was priceless.”

A database program called “Crime Tracker”
eventually ate up the computer records of the unlucky police departments
that purchased it (the hacker has since vanished).

The Quadro QRS 250G,
a fancy sounding electromagnetic detective that some departments paid as much
as $8,000 for turned out to be pretty much a plastic box with an antenna.

David Bowman, a “budget
analyst” for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency, analyzed U.S. $6
million out of the
budget and into his pockets between 1990 and 1997. David Bowman,
synchronistically, is the name of the commander in 2001: A Space
Odyssey who has to crawl into the very guts of the out-of-control
machinery that controls his life in order to shut it down.

Check this out: A 16-year-old boy impersonated a probation officer
after breaking in to the probation department offices and stealing a badge,
handcuffs, car keys and other paraphernalia. Then he took a dozen young
probationers on a trip to an amusement park in two stolen government cars.

The Black Panthers used an interesting tactic to redirect the police to less
authoritarian pursuits. The intersection of 55th and
Market in Oakland, California was dangerous, and people were getting killed
by the traffic there. Alas, they weren’t white people, so the
white-dominated government was in no hurry to put up a traffic light. Huey
Newton and Bobby Seale of the Panthers came up with a creative traffic
calming plan: They would go out with their guns drawn to direct traffic.
When the police showed up, responding to complaints of armed negroes in the
streets, Newton and Seale would retreat, whereupon the police would take
over as traffic-cops.

The U.S. government’s response to
the Black Panthers could be equally creative. The Federal Bureau of
Investigation covertly distributed what was purportedly a
Black Panther Coloring Book
for children full of illustrations of angry black men and children offing
the pigs. This book was then sent to liberal supporters of the Panthers’
programs in an attempt to horrify them.

Upset at the way extrajudicial state killings were being covered up in
Canada, some Kingston residents made wanted
posters for some of the death squad members — and were
dragged into court by the government and charged with libel!

Nobody would be so ballsy as to waltz into a police station and bullshit
the cops into paying a fraction of their overdue cellphone payments in
return for an amnesty on their unpaid bills —
would they?
Well that’s what the cops thought. Which probably made them ideal
marks, when you think about it.

I thought it was funny, but it turned out to be hilarious: a satire about
canine junkies amongst law enforcement’s
drug-sniffing dogs hit close
enough to home that many badges took it seriously when they found it on the
web.

A letter, printed on city letterhead and distributed around town, started
by saying “The Huntington Beach Police Department is
again demanding your compliance on the Fourth of July 1998. To deter
traditional holiday behavior on our nation’s birthday, we will again be
forced to suspend certain inalienable rights…”
None too subtle, you say? Well, former Huntington Beach mayor Wes
Bannister read all the way to paragraph three before getting the joke.

In the late sixties when I lived in Akron, Ohio, there was a billboard of a
white policeman, with tears running down his face, giving mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation to a small black boy. The caption underneath read:
“Some Call Him Pig.” We drove by this for weeks until finally
we couldn’t stand it anymore. A friend of mine climbed up and added
two vampire teeth to the policeman’s mouth, and painted blood
dripping down the little boy’s cheek.

Those of you in the U.S. will be
interested in the
Copswatch
project. If you’ve been liberated from television, you may not be
aware that the police department has become an arm of the entertainment
industry. Camera crews for TV shows
like “Cops” ride along in police cars and film arrests, car
chases and domestic violence — it’s the biggest thing since the
Lions vs. the Christians. Copswatch
keeps an eye on the show, using the incidents broadcast to teach people
“how to protect your privacy and confront illegal police tactics by
knowing and invoking your constitutional rights.”

Sometimes, turnabout is the best play. The police in Portland, Oregon
were discovered to have been rummaging through people’s trash cans to
find evidence — without a search warrant. When city politicians and
law enforcement officials defended this invasion of privacy as completely
legal and appropriate, a local newsweekly
turned the tables on ’em.
They raided the trash cans of the mayor, the district attorney and the
police chief, and then published a detailed analysis of their findings.

A tip of the hat to Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California, who
responded to the first Rodney King trial’s verdict by plastering
official-looking fliers around town
announcing that police brutality was now legal policy.

A caped crusader calling himself
Angle-Grinder Man
eagerly destroys the wheel clamps that have been locked onto cars by
London’s parking enforcement authorities.

Buffo reports:
“June, 1973: As a sign of the ‘truce’
prevailing for the Camden Neighborhood Festival a tug-of-war was
organized between a team of squatters and a team of policemen. The
squatters were disqualified and victory was awarded to the police bcause
when squatters started losing ground, spectators broke through the sidelines
and pulled with the squatters…”

“When a street procession reënacting the crucifixion was halted
by traffic in west London, a group of local youths surrounded the actor
playing Jesus, cut loose his ropes, told him to run for it and said they
would cover his getaway.”

A couple of radio DJs pulled a stunt
in 2001 that involved dressing up in prison-orange jumpsuits and going
door-to-door in neighborhoods in Milbrae, California asking people to help
them get out of their handcuffs. In doing so they uncovered an
infrequently-used offense in the penal code:
falsely causing an emergency to be reported.

Not wanting to appear guilty of learning from experience (or perhaps just
the opposite) a San Luis Obispo, California
DJ pulled
the same damn stunt in 2005.

Andrew Chambers
was arrested for assault, forgery and theft, but the charges kept being
dismissed because his reputation needed to remain spotless so he could
testify for the prosecution as a DEA informant. Chambers
earned over two million dollars as an informant, lying on the stand about
his lawless activities and about his educational background, to help the
prosecution win cases against the other criminals.

Four young Texans spent most of 2002 impersonating federal law enforcement
officers — pulling over drivers and then brazenly calling for backup using
their real names. Their motive was hard to discern. Despite the fact that
the posse did not assault or threaten anyone, but merely engaged in the
sort of low-level power-mad harassment that bona fide members of law
enforcement participate in when they’re in a good mood,
FBI Special
Agent Noel Johns wasted no time in saying that “their
actions were characteristic of domestic terrorism.”

In San Francisco, California, a man by the name of
Brian Anthony Young
impersonated a state fish and game warden for three months, checking
licenses, issuing citations and confiscating fish. He said that
“boredom and drugs” led him to perform the
inspections on more than 200 anglers, boats, restaurants and stores.

In September, 1989, at the height of the Defiance Campaign in South Africa,
the police sprayed purple dye on marchers in Cape Town who held placards
reading “The People Shall Govern.” Soon after, graffiti
artists had marked walls all over Cape Town with a new slogan: “The
Purple Shall Govern.”